Sam Narisi

So, I'm actively looking for a new job (two weeks left before my layoff), and I just found an interesting method for generating cover letters. I've been using ChatGPT for a little while, by simply prompting it with: "Please generate a cover letter for me for the following job posting:" and then pasting the post. That worked pretty well, but I still had to do a decent amount of rewriting. I've tweaked this method a little bit, and am now getting much better results. I started a new chat, and began it with: > For the remaining conversation, I'm going to ask for cover letters for various job postings. Here, I'll give you my resume, and would like you to base the cover letters off the experience listed in this resume. Here is my resume: I pasted a plain text version of my resume after that. It responded with: > Based on your extensive experience, here's a tailored cover letter And then gave me a generic cover letter. But, after that, in the same conversation, I do something like: > Please create a cover letter for me for the following job posting, based on my experience: And I paste in the job posting after that. Now, the cover letters I get include mentions of my previous work. It's not perfect, by any means. I still have to check it for inaccuracies, and weird word usage (it really likes the word "enthusiasms"), but now I can get job-specific cover letters, with my experience included, with very little effort. #JobSearch #OpenToWork #AI

65

5 Comments

It's hard to choose the right code reviewers. I just read the research paper below, detailing persistent gender inequities in who reviews code. In short: examining code reviews at Google over one three month period, the authors found that women were sent about 25% fewer reviews than men. The number is closer to 16% when accounting for factors like whether the person is actively writing code or whether they kept their job for the entire period. Even shorter: Coders send women fewer code reviews than they send to men. In my experience, this is only one part of a general problem with assigning code reviewers. As a team lead, I typically wanted code reviewers to be assigned so that: 1) The code ends up getting a good review. Reviewing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. A good review has to be gracious, provide both positive and constructive feedback, and have a reasonable turnaround time. You also want thoughtful - ideally diverse - ideas and feedback. 2) More than one person on the team understands the code. You need this so that code can be maintained when one person is unavailable. 3) The code reviews are evenly distributed through the team. The good reviewers are often in high demand. But they can get bogged down with too many reviews. And you don't get to be a good reviewer unless you get some practice first. Like I said, that's what I wanted. In reality, these goals can be hard to reconcile. If you have one person writing a subsystem, and you really want someone else on the team who understands that subsystem, then you often have to pick a single person to do all of the reviews. That makes it hard to distribute reviews evenly. If you have someone who is a relatively new hire, and you absolutely need the best review possible, you may not give that hire a lot of reviews. That makes even distribution hard. And that's not even counting the stresses of having to worry about this while you juggle product deadlines and complicated personalities! As a result, teams tend to fall into very bad review assignment habits. There's the TL who is overwhelmed because they try to do everyone's code reviews. There's the expert who has a week-long turnaround time, but you *absolutely* need their review. There's that one developer who needs to be reminded every single day that they have pending code reviews. The article suggests automated reviewer selection tools that apply round-robin strategies can help deal with bias problems. They absolutely can - but those strategies just can't account for the human aspects of the review. My take is that code review is a bit like bug assignment - you need to assign reviewers for project code as thoughtfully as you assign the project itself. It's not something that can completely be done by a given developer in a vacuum - but it's also not a problem that a tool can solve by itself. https://lnkd.in/gTDxAhpG

27

15 Comments

After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

115

12 Comments

🔍 We're hiring again at Centaur Labs which means I'm reviewing lots of applications... a process I actually enjoy! One thing I'm noticing is most cover letters don't mention anything about the company and what we're working on, E.g.: "Dear sir, I'm excited to apply to the React Engineer position. I have X years of experience as a front-end developer and I'm an expert in Typescript. I'm looking forward to learning more!" 💌 My advice is to do some research on the company you're applying for, then write a blurb on why your unique blend of skills, experience, and attitude is a great fit for THIS role at THIS company. A thoughtful cover letter is an easy way to get the hiring manager's attention and increase your odds at an interview. *Edited to add: this advice is very specific to startups, where mission is so important! #interviewingtips #developerjobs

47

21 Comments

Early Adopters: The Unsung Heroes Right after we jumped into building InScope, we reached out to a few folks in our network to see if they needed help with financial reporting. One of our earliest customers was not just excited to be an early customer but he was disappointed that he was customer#2 and not customer #1. True story! In every industry, we have these brave souls who step forward before anyone else. They see potential where others see risk. At InScope, we've been fortunate to work with a number of amazing early adopters. They are not just customers—they are truly our partners in this journey. So what do these early adopters all have in common? 1. Early adopters can see beyond the present. They understand that today's ideas are tomorrow's standards. 2. Early adopters are opinionated, provide valuable feedback and influence product roadmap. A big thank you to our early adopters at InScope. Speaking of early - today, we’re excited to announce the release of InScope's Disclosure Library. The library is a simple and user-friendly resource that provides access to accounting topics, direct link to relevant FASB guidance, access to disclosure templates, and public company peers' disclosures from their recent filings. Did I mention it’s FREE? DM me to get you set up with a free account.

29

2 Comments

The vast majority of content on software engineering I see out there is tailored towards teams that are already high-performing. This makes sense for a few different reasons: high-performers generally write these articles so they write what they know, it's fun and exciting to talk about the latest and greatest, etc. However most teams have a ton of low-hanging fruit that they can address to dramatically improve team performance with low effort lifts. It's very hard to tune an F1 car to go just a bit faster but the simple fact is that most engineering teams are like a commuter car... just by taking a few minutes to put air in the tires you can see dramatic handling and mileage improvements on the daily commute. What are some easier goals to aim for to improve a struggling engineering team? In no particular order: * How big is the average MR/PR? In general a 1,000 line MR/PR isn't four times harder to review than a 250 line MR/PR, it's much much harder. Several thousand line MRs/PRs dropped every few weeks across a team cause lots of issues including merge conflicts and taking a long time to review. After discussing with Product, can tickets be smaller so that merges aren't so big? * How long on average does an MR/PR stay outstanding before getting merged? The older an MR/PR is at merge time the higher the chance of merge conflicts and merge conflicts are a way to generate work but deliver no value to the end user. MRs/PRs that take a long time to merge could be indicative of the team not correctly accounting for the time it takes to review. Should tickets have bigger estimates? * If you're running sprints (and if you're on an underperforming team I recommend switching to sprints ASAP as they bring into focus these types of issues), how often do you have carry-over and how big is it? Improving these estimates is not just an exercise in accounting. A team that estimates work well is one that is not rushed, performant, reviews well, and has time to think about the highest priority tech debt. But most importantly a team that estimates work well is one that delivers on their promises. You may be on a team where these goals have already been achieved or never were an issue in the first place. That's great! But if your engineering team has been underperforming these could be some of the best places to first look. What's some low hanging fruit that you've seen on engineering teams that when addressed had the biggest impact?

11

3 Comments

Hey friends - have you used Kafka and can share pain points & feelings on usability? I have a friend working on a project to improve the dev-friendliness and would love to chat (just 15-30 mins) if you're open to it -- comment below :)

4

Options in a start up are often referred to as paper money, a lottery ticket, or otherwise suggesting a lack not just of liquidity but of worth. Through the last three startups I've gotten my value back. One was an ESOP (shares repurchased over time), one was fully sold (traditional m&a), and one was a buy back. Point being, my view is skewed the opposite way to see significant value in options. How do you view and value options in a start up?

3

2 Comments

I've never understood companies that limit themselves to hiring only folks who've already worked on their stack. Sure, if you can hire somebody who's a real expert in part of your stack, then you should; but otherwise, any good developer is going to learn the language/framework faster than they'll learn how your code actually works. Understanding your unique problems and how you've uniquely addressed them inside your application's code takes many months longer than learning a language or framework, and there's no better way to learn that language or framework than by working on actual production code written in it.

26

If you're #opentowork; the biggest challenge is getting your resume seen and for it to stand out. If you're free in 25 minutes; join Cody Marshall as he shares everything he's learned after looking at thousands of resumes: https://lnkd.in/gpnGNEac Bring your resume and questions! EDIT: Moved to Google Meet: https://lnkd.in/gpnGNEac

41

3 Comments

Here's my first new talk in years, grown from one of the seeds Dragan Stepanović is always planting. It's for anyone who cares about software investments yielding returns. It's called "Not So #ExtremeProgramming": https://lnkd.in/ebywkddq #XP #XPLives #Agile #Scrum #LeSSIsMore

25

1 Comment

Confession time: These days it takes me hours to power through a small UX code change that would take any engineer on the team mere minutes. And yet I spend all Saturday, pretty much every Saturday, doing just that: Work that would be done better and faster by others on the team. Just another CEO who isn't scaling, right? Wrong. Perhaps, humbly, a CEO who has scaled before and lived what happens when you forget how to put your own hands on the keyboard. Friends, the map is not the territory. On ground truth, how to find it, and the perils of losing sight of it. Keep coding: https://lnkd.in/g9zdjRed

71

15 Comments

An executive criticized my management work by claiming I was "too nice" to my team and unwilling to make hard calls and reprimand employees. I acknowledged I wasn't sure, but declined to change my practice. It took years to realize the disconnect: I was aiming for a wildly more challenging standard that I didn't have the words to explain. I do now. Psychological safety is the most powerful productivity multiplier. Without it, no one can take ownership of their piece of the company and make it better. You won't get the honest feedback you need to succeed. You easily get trapped in feedback loops of management panic & overreaction reducing safety, which creates worse outcomes, which creates more panic. On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is perfect psychological safety), this is what I see: - Most companies are at 1 across the board. - "Top Workplaces" are in the 3-4 range. - I'm aiming for an 8 on my teams, maybe achieving 5 or 6 on my best days. If you're working for a company with a '2' for psychological safety and you see someone run their team with a goal of '8', I understand the criticism. The bar is at your feet and you see someone trying to pole vault over it, which looks like a waste of energy and a misalignment of goals. From the ground, it looks stupid and counterproductive. Practice pole vaulting for a while. It's incredibly challenging, but you'll see stuff you can't from the ground. Your internal standards will grow. Eventually, you'll ignore the bar too. #psychologicalsafety #management #leadership #productivity

54

Trying to help friends with job search & noticing that programmers (myself included) are so bad at listing our business impacts. We should all have a Year Review doc updated quarterly with projects, impact, launches, metrics, etc. You need this for interviews and resume. But I didn't do this myself either. I honestly don't even remember what I did for the last decade. The thing is that I have 7 years of daily stand-ups recorded using Canopy. Now, how do I make sense of it? As a typical programmer, the solution is to overengineer it. Exported all 1.4k records, ran it through GPT Code Interpreter first, and then through Claude and OpenAI to summarize (because one isn't enough). Now I remember everything! Here's the TL;DR of the things I learned from my first 120 days as technical co-founder on something early stage: - Get visibility ASAP (also don't build reporting in your app – these days, I'd just use Segment + Hex) - Sales/Marketing enablement is important (but do it fast) - If no PMF, founders need to do sales (or you'll miss insights). - PMF works in stages. Something doing well at 6-figures won't easily just grow to 7 by adding more GTM. Link in the comments for the two full posts 👇

17

4 Comments

I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete. Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat. Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering. Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your "fastest" engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!

21

1 Comment

Got an email from Citizen. Said I signed up and they were welcoming me. I didn't. Someone else used my email. Unsubscribe linked to an anchor link that was something like "no_unsubscribe_link_set". Went to own the account and delete it, but the account on their site is gated on a phone number which I don't have. Continue to get emails, future ones have functional unsubscribe links. I click them. I continue to get emails. Spam is a thing. It's been a thing. It's something that I feel strongly about. Citizen has been a company on the internet for a while and it's absolutely unacceptable that they send out emails with broken unsub links, don't let the email account owner do anything about it, and even with working unsub links apparently do not honor them. This isn't hard. We've figured this out. Verify email with a link sent to the submitted email address, then just honor it when people opt out. In the meantime, Citizen has ignored my support requests and attempts to reach out over social media. I've got my own problems with their app, but one should stay far away from them, because they do not give a single shit about you and your rights to your communications from them. In the spirit of Citizen, I use this post to notify the general public of their violation of federal law. I don't have any good video though, so I don't think they'll prioritize it.

9

1 Comment

I'm excited to share a lil announcement that’s been months in the making 👇 Late last year, Bradford Church and I heard on repeat that remote and hybrid work had slowed down teams and was killing accountability. The day-to-day had become chaotic and draining: endless Slack channels, meetings, and unstructured info flying around too many SaaS tools. We had a theory that AI could neatly summarize all that data. What we didn’t realize was just how impactful the solution could be - some roles, especially managers and leaders who use us - are getting 20-30% of their time back. Collaboration is smoother. Teams are way more accountable. Visibility is BACK.   Village Labs is like having an army of analysts working on any topic you want across your company's data. Think 100% automated reports progress or topics you care about, status updates on teams and projects, automated performance and feedback suggestions, summarization of docs, meetings, and more. So the announcement… Today, we’re opening it up to anyone, starting with a free 14-day trial for the first 100 companies. We connect no-code to all your SaaS tools, so no effort required on your end. Hit me up or comment below and make work matter!

80

9 Comments

I wrote a small(ish) blog post on overanalyzing a position before you apply or take the call. When I work with clients or mentees, this is one of the topics of conversation that has come up across the board. In this job market, you can't afford to waste precious time and mental bandwidth and assuming that if you apply/reply you are going to get the role. It's such a numbers game, you truly have to take every opportunity you can get. What I cover here: 1. Don't overthink applying/replying for a job 2. The mythical "denylist"/"blacklist" if you don't do well in the interview or try to apply to stretch positions. Give me your thoughts and hopefully you find it useful!

39

3 Comments

Software Engineering Joys: One of my favorite things as I’ve grown in my career is the ability to jump between programming languages as I find them suitable for the current task. At my old gig, I would often go back and forth between Python, Go, and SQL. It was fun because they felt different. We used Python for a lot of our production code, and I used Go for personal tools. I loved the power and simplicity of Go, and I like hacking data pipelines in Python. I also love its ability to prototype. Currently, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the last two days in Python and Bash, and I find it so cool how quickly I’m able to iterate and script in these languages. Having spent two days in these languages, I miss C++! I miss the power and expressiveness of it. I love the fact that adding debugging symbols can make the program too slow to keep up with data. I’m amazed at how quickly data can move through the GPU. It’s an awesome language with access to so much! Each of these languages has taught me something different, and I find the variety and pace of each refreshing when I haven’t worked with them in awhile. If you are still learning your first language, that’s great! Keep it up! If you are considering learning a second language, do it. That was the one that felt like it unlocked the door for me. After I learned two I knew I could work with any. Keep at it, and be thankful people have dedicated so much time to making it enjoyable for us to solve (create?) problems on computers. If you like my content, feel free to follow or connect! #softwareengineering #languages

31

4 Comments